This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.

In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

To begin with, proponents of decolonisation almost never acknowledge one basic fact - that most poor and working-class students have suffered the indignity of being miseducated for twelve years of their lives. South Africa’s schooling system ranks consistently amongst the worst in the world and by the time these students enter elite universities, they are hopelessly prepared for academic life and struggle to cope with the unrelenting institutional demands. But instead of acknowledging these difficulties as areas for personal development, like Aesop’s fox they conclude that the grapes must be sour because they are unreachable.

The multi-purpose colonial dog cannot solve what is a monumental predicament. Well-intentioned yet continually unable to socialise with the natives, the white settler repeats history in grand Marxian fashion, “first as a tragedy, then as farce”. Emigration offers the prospect of a life in which one no longer has to agonise about engaging with slaves who refuse to be treated as slaves any longer. Blindness to the Other can continue uninterrupted; one need not countenance the horrifying prospect of becoming the equals of former underlings. Having prospered off the land for hundreds of years, there is little sense of civic responsibility, no pang of duty to contribute towards social betterment.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argues that the civilisational setup is antithetical to human happiness: the individual quest for freedom - specifically, the discharge of the sexual and aggressive drives - is thwarted repeatedly by societal demands for conformity. And yet, despite identifying easily with two sources of our suffering - the awesome power of the natural world and the hopeless fragility of the human constitution - we are less inclined to concede as the third, and main, source of that suffering the lockstep marching of state and society. In Freud’s view, “When we start considering this possibility, we come across a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell on it. This contention holds that what we call our civilisation is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilisation, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilisation.